The recent trend, on the part of radiologists and physicists, of developing equipment performance specifications to assure the purchaser of the best possible performing system is a big step in the right direction, but the current approach raises some strong concerns. The method of defining the state-of-the-art or requiring the best available performance on subsystem parameters without reconciling that requirement with overall system performance is unrealistic. This short paper appeals to the medical community to strive for a closer corelation between performance specifications and the actual clinical requirements of the application.